Most stores and shops that offer goods to the public utilize well established procedures for tracking revenue and inventory at a point of sale. However, there are many occasions where these same stores and shops must provide a good to a member of the public without receiving payment from the recipient of the good. One frequently observed example of such a transaction is where due to some sort of dissatisfaction on the part of a consumer, the shop provides the consumer with a product free of charge.
In such a transaction, a good is being transferred to consumer but payment is not received. In some sense though, payment is being received: the shop merchant is actually paying for the good; however the price paid is simply the cost paid by the merchant to obtain the good for the shop. The price paid to obtain the good for the shop is often referred to as a cost price, and that convention is adopted herein.
In any transaction where a product is provided to a consumer without requiring payment for the product, the transaction can be treated as a transfer where the cost price is attributed to some party. In the example above, the shop itself is the party to whom the cost price is attributed. However, there are situations where a store is but one part of a much larger merchant. In that situation, a non-monetary transfer of a good to a consumer can be attributed to another part or branch of the merchant.
A classic example of a store or shop that is but one part of a larger merchant is the convenience store or gift shop in a hotel. The typical hotel convenience store provides various items such as toiletries, snacks, and beverages to hotel guests so the guests do not have to leave the premises of the hotel. While the hotel convenience store typically sells items to hotel guests, there are many occasions where items in the store are provided to a guest without requiring payment.
Examples of such non-monetary transfers occur where for example, a guest is a member of a hotel rewards program that provides free beverages. Another example may be where the marketing department of a hotel is providing drinks or snacks to hotel guests and members of the public at large. In some instance, items of the hotel shop may be taken for use by the hotel restaurant, if for example the restaurant exhausts its supply of soda or chips. In such a situation, the transfer of the goods is to another employee of the hotel rather than a guest. However, accounting for non-monetary transfers focuses on to whom the cost is attributed rather than who actually receives the goods.
Conventional point-of-sale (POS) software systems are lacking in a way to adequately deal with both sales and non-monetary transfers of goods out of the inventory of a shop. Many POS systems do not even account for such non-monetary transfers out of inventory. Others POS systems treat non-monetary transfers with a completely different processing paradigm as compared with a sale. A need exists for a comprehensive system (which may be referred to as a point-of-inventory transaction system or “POINT” system) that dynamically and efficiently determines whether a transaction is a sale or a non-monetary transfer and subsequently records and accounts for both types of transactions.